From:	pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org (Peter J. Farley III)
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Why not fork() etc. specific for for shell usage?
Date:	Fri, 06 Jun 1997 03:47:12 GMT
Organization:	The Dorsai Embassy, Inc.
Lines:	32
Message-ID:	<339787eb.2387875@news.dorsai.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	pjfarley.ppp1.dorsai.org
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

I'm definitely *not* trying to start a flame here, but I felt this was
one of those "obvious" things I should point out, in case no one else
saw it before.  Please be gentle with me if I've stepped into it
without realizing how deep it was...<g>.

I have been perusing the mail archive, and while I see many
discussions of multitasking/multiprocessing and the limitations of the
DOS environment, I did not see this side of the issue addressed:

Why can't DJGPP implement sufficient tasking to just support shell
pipes and redirection, which only involve standard I/O, and
synchronous subshells for () and `` operations?  IOW, there would be
no need to support message passing, named pipes, etc. (the hard
stuff).  Asynchronous process support would not be needed, since most
shell scripts don't need or use it.  At the very least, this would
make *building* unix-based software more standard in the DJGPP
environment, IMHO.

No, it would not support true "background" processing.  And no, it
would not support realistic *user* process programming, but that's the
*hard* part, and we need to keep looking for solutions to that one.
It *would* help solve some of the problems we encounter *building*
other folk's software for our environment, I think, and that can only
help by giving us more time to work on the really hard parts, and less
time tweaking unix-based scripts to accomodate the deficiencies in
DOS.

Comments appreciated, even if they're only to point out the errant
folly of my thinking, or lack thereof.

----------------------------------------------------
Peter J. Farley III (pjfarley AT dorsai DOT org)

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